Types of Damages in Hawaiʻi Personal Injury Claims

Honolulu Injury Lawyer Explains Types of Recovery

Video Transcript: 

Tom Mustin: 

What damages can you claim for personal injury in Hawaii?

Wayne Parsons: 

You can claim all of the losses that you suffer. Those fall into categories, economic damages are loss of income, loss of wages, past and future, it also includes medical expenses, past and future, if you have a life-long medical care. The second category is general damages, and general damages are pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, mental anxiety and agony, disfigurement and other items that are not subject to a test, nobody can measure how much pain you're in or how much suffering you are enduring. And so those are the major categories.

The third category is punitive damages, they are rare, it's rare that you get punitive damages in a case, and we don't always ask for punitive damages. It has to be for grossly negligent behavior. It has to be for intentional acts that injure another person. It's in really, really egregious, bad, terrible situations where the defendant... What the defendant did is terrible. I'll give you an example, the sex abuse of minors by the... From the clergy, from schools, those cases almost always are ripe for an award of punitive damages because the behavior is so... So terrible.

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